Treasures of the Collection

The ancient world in its images on coins

2 December 2009 – 16 May 2010

Masterpieces from the coin collection of the Historisches Museum Bern. The Historisches Museum Bern possesses one of the most important collections of ancient coins in Switzerland. A selection of its finest pieces will be shown in the new Cabinet Exhibition in the Museum’s KUBUS extension. The exhibition will focus on the images on coins that in various ways give insights into life in the ancient world. Greek vases and small-scale Roman sculptures from the Museum’s collection supplement the exhibition and permit cross-references between the decorative arts and coins. Computer animations will help explain the small images on coins and make them more readily accessible for the visitor.

Guest exhibition of the Association 300 Years of New Bern
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300 years daughter-city in America
4 December 2009 – 16 May 2010

For the first time the Historisches Museum in Bern (BHM) is placing its new temporary exhibition room in its KUBUS extension at the disposal of an external organizer. Bern’s daughter-city New Bern in North Carolina is celebrating its third centenary in 2010. The Association 300 Years of New Bern is planning to celebrate the jubilee of the earliest Swiss settlement in the USA with a guest exhibition in the BHM’s new Kubus annex. The exhibition leads the public through the history of New Bern in eleven scenes. Themes covered include emigration from Bern in the early eighteenth century and the life of the town’s founder, Christoph von Graffenried. The exhibition will be supplemented by a multimedia show on present-day New Bern.

Further information about the exhibition on www.newbern.ch

Three exploratory journeys into the still unknown expanses of the Pacific Ocean made the British navigator and explorer James Cook (1728–1779) famous. The lands he discovered included Hawaii. He was the first to map New Zealand, Australia and the island world of the South Seas. His voyages not only gave new impulses to navigation, astronomy, natural history and art in the age of the Enlightenment, but also enriched the science of ethnology. On Cook’s third voyage a painter with Swiss roots was also on board: John Webber, the son of a sculptor from Bern by the name of Wäber who had emigrated to England. Bern is indebted to John Webber for one of the world’s most prestigious collections of ethnographic artefacts, including the precious feather cloak of a Hawaiian chieftain. This exhibition will for the first time combine artefacts from the permanent collection of Bern’s Historisches Museum with important loans from all over the world and thus bring together the most valuable objects exemplifying Pacific cultures brought back by Cook’s expeditions.

The exhibition tells the story of James Cook’s voyages through some 500 exhibits. Alongside the ethnographic exhibits, magnificent paintings and drawings by the expedition painters Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges and John Webber document the events and capture in an impressive way the euphoria and at the same time the scientific curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, that distinguished the explorer’s reactions to the exotic sceneries of the South Seas. Model ships, original nautical charts and navigational instruments bring back Cook’s voyages in a fascinating and vivid way.

An exhibition held in cooperation with the “Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle” of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn (28. 8. 2009 – 10. 1. 2010) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum – Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna (March to July 2010)